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Merrick, NY—While it’s rare for a jeweler to hire unpaid interns for sales positions, if you are planning on tapping your local college or high school for some unpaid labor to help clean up a backlog of paperwork, revamp your website or Facebook page, or even to help organize old inventory, beware before you hire. You must provide a tangible educational benefit to your intern, not simply gain a pair of free hands—and answering the phone or performing basic clerical tasks does not qualify as an adequate learning experience.

Recent lawsuits by interns against their hiring companies have resulted in a crackdown on the rules governing free internships. You can read a full list of the laws here, but if you want to hire an intern and not risk being sued later, the key points to remember are:

• The intern cannot be used to replace a paid employee unless he or she also is compensated at least minimum wage for the work performed.
• The unpaid intern’s responsibilities must provide educational value similar to what they’d learn in a classroom. The key is “similar.” While you don’t have to deliver daily lectures, if you’re hiring an intern to work in your marketing department, their job has to be something that will give them valuable marketing experience, not filing and fetching coffee.
• To ensure the internship is educational, prepare a “curriculum” of skills the intern will learn in his or her time at your company.
• The unpaid internship must first benefit of the intern, not the employer. The business cannot be dependent on the work of the intern—and in fact teaching the intern may well take time from the employer that would have been productively spent elsewhere.
• You are not obligated to offer the intern a job upon completion of the internship.

Top image: Blog.openviewpartners.com